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LSEG’s new Digital Markets Infrastructure (DMI), built in partnership with Microsoft and running on Microsoft Azure, has officially launched for private funds — and the platform has already facilitated its first tokenised fundraise, marking a major step toward mainstreaming tokenization across private markets. Background LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership in December 2022 that committed LSEG’s data and infrastructure onto Microsoft Azure and...

Microsoft is giving a time‑boxed lifeline: if you need to keep a Windows 10 PC protected after October 14, 2025, you can enroll eligible machines in the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program to receive security‑only patches through October 13, 2026 — but enrollment has strict technical and account requirements, a phased rollout, and important privacy and compatibility trade‑offs to weigh. Background / Overview Windows 10 reaches its official end of support on October 14, 2025...

Windows 10 will stop receiving free security fixes on October 14, 2025 — and if your PC can’t take the free Windows 11 upgrade, you have five realistic paths forward: enroll in Extended Security Updates (ESU), buy or rent a new Windows 11 PC (including cloud PCs), perform an unsupported upgrade to Windows 11, replace Windows with Linux or ChromeOS Flex, or accept the risk of running an unsupported OS. Act now: the calendar is fixed, the options have costs and caveats, and each choice...

Microsoft's quiet remapping of the Xbox button in recent Windows 11 Insider builds turns a single longstanding controller gesture into a small but meaningful productivity shortcut, letting a long press open Task View so players can switch apps without reaching for keyboard or mouse. Background / Overview Microsoft has been steadily refining controller support in Windows 11 for the last two years, driven by the rise of Windows-based handheld gaming hardware and the company's stated goal of...

Microsoft has quietly added a one‑click internet speed test to recent Windows 11 Insider builds — a seemingly helpful convenience that, upon inspection, is not a native diagnostic at all but a launcher that opens Bing’s web‑based speed‑test widget in the default browser. Background Windows has long left quick throughput checks to third‑party utilities and websites: Speedtest, Fast.com, and lightweight taskbar monitors filled a gap for users who wanted instant visibility into download...

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The UK government’s recent trial of AI coding assistants has delivered striking headline figures — developers reporting almost an hour saved per working day, equivalent to roughly 28 working days a year — but the programme also exposes the tough trade‑offs that come with rapid AI adoption in high‑security, high‑impact codebases. Over a three‑month experiment across more than 50 departments, Government Digital Service (GDS) deployed mainstream tools including GitHub Copilot and Google’s...

Satya Nadella’s terse admission — “we can do better” — landed like a seismic aftershock inside Microsoft, crystallizing months of tension as one of the world’s largest tech companies simultaneously cut thousands of roles, tightened internal communications, and rolled out a phased requirement for employees near offices to be onsite at least three days a week; the CEO’s pledge to “rebuild trust” is real, but rebuilding will require measurable governance changes, clear KPIs, and visible...

Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non‑binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) that frames the “next phase” of one of the technology sector’s most consequential partnerships — preserving deep commercial ties while opening the door to multicloud compute, a governance restructure at OpenAI, and a set of unresolved legal and product‑level details that will determine how the relationship shapes enterprise AI over the rest of the decade. Background Microsoft and OpenAI’s relationship began as...

Microsoft’s lifecycle clock is now glaringly visible for many organizations: support for several Windows releases will stop within months, and the window for action is short enough that CIOs, IT managers, and school IT directors must move from planning to execution now. A recent lifecycle reminder — echoed across vendor newsletters and community outlets — confirms that Windows 11 version 22H2 (Enterprise, Education, IoT Enterprise) reaches end of servicing on October 14, 2025, and that...

Microsoft is quietly adding a one‑click internet speed test to Windows 11’s network flyout — but for now the shortcut simply opens Bing’s web-based speed test in your default browser rather than running a fully local diagnostic. Background Microsoft published Insider Preview builds 26220.6682 (Dev Channel) and 26120.6682 (Beta/Release Preview lineage) as part of the KB5065782 checkpoint, and community researchers discovered a new UI affordance that places a Perform speed test control in the...

Microsoft has begun testing a change that remaps the Xbox button on controllers in Windows 11 so a long press opens Task View, while a short press still opens the Game Bar and a sustained hold still powers the controller off. Background Microsoft has steadily worked to make Windows 11 friendlier to controller-driven experiences. Over the last couple of years the company added controller-first features such as a gamepad-focused on‑screen keyboard, a compact Xbox app mode for small screens...

Microsoft’s quiet expansion of Phone Link into the Windows 11 Start menu has quietly reshaped how many of us treat our phones while working on a PC, folding basic phone functions—notifications, calls, messages, photos, and device status—into a single, one-click experience on the desktop. Background Since the Your Phone app evolved into Phone Link, Microsoft has steadily broadened the app’s remit: first deep Android integration, then progressive support for iPhone features, and now an...

Microsoft quietly rolled a small but potentially meaningful convenience into recent Windows 11 Insider builds: a “Perform speed test” entry in the network menu and Wi‑Fi quick settings that launches an internet speed check directly from the taskbar, but crucially it opens Bing’s web‑based speed test in your default browser rather than running a native diagnostic inside the operating system. This is a low‑friction, highly discoverable addition — placed exactly where users already go to check...

Microsoft’s latest Insider experiments repurpose the post‑setup SCOOBE flow into a full‑screen, blocking reminder that tells Windows 11 users when their Microsoft 365 subscription “needs attention,” and the change has reignited a familiar debate: when does helpful notification become in‑OS marketing? Background / Overview SCOOBE — the Second Chance Out of Box Experience — is Microsoft’s follow‑up layer to OOBE (Out‑of‑Box Experience). It exists to re‑surface setup choices users skipped...

The path from AI hype to steady, measurable value is rarely a straight line; New Era Technology’s conversation with UC Today — led by Kristian McCann and Steve Daly — lays out a pragmatic playbook for moving organizations beyond AI disillusionment and into sustained Copilot adoption. The central message is simple but often ignored: velocity matters, but discipline matters more. Enterprises that pair rapid experiments with rigorous data foundations, governance, and human-centered change...

Ralph Lauren has quietly moved from runway innovation to conversational commerce with the launch of Ask Ralph, a branded, in-app AI stylist built on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI platform and rolling out to U.S. Ralph Lauren app users as a shoppable, visual-first shopping assistant. Background Ralph Lauren’s Ask Ralph is the latest iteration of a decades-long push to fuse storytelling and commerce. The company describes Ask Ralph as a conversational shopping experience that interprets...

Windows 10 reaches a hard stop on October 14, 2025: Microsoft will cease providing free security updates, feature and quality patches, and standard technical support for mainstream Windows 10 editions — and it has laid out a tightly scoped set of transition options, including a one‑year consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) pathway, upgrade incentives to Windows 11, and cloud‑based alternatives to help users buy time while they migrate. Background Windows 10 launched in 2015 and has been...

Ukraine’s customer‑service teams face a simple fact in 2025: the volume, velocity, and multilingual nature of support requests make AI tools less of a luxury and more of an operational necessity — but picking the right tools, piloting them against real KPIs, and protecting data and jobs must come first. Background / Overview Across Ukraine’s retail, fintech, healthcare and HoReCa sectors, two technical realities combine to force rapid change. First, customers expect 24/7 responses across...

Microsoft’s Computex message — that Windows 10 had reached “3 hundred million” active devices — was an attention-grabbing milestone, but a closer look at contemporaneous market-share data shows a more complicated reality: Windows 10’s raw install base was growing fast, yet Windows 7 remained the single most-used desktop operating system worldwide at the time, with legacy versions such as Windows XP still holding non-trivial slices of the market. Background In spring 2016 Microsoft and its...